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Marcel Hirscher underlined his status as the best skier of his generation with a first, long-overdue Olympic gold in the alpine combined on Tuesday.

“Everyone’s been saying, ‘Nice career, but an Olympic gold medal is still missing’. This is perfect, unbelievable,” said Hirscher, who has won an unprecedented six consecutive World Cup overall titles on the back of 55 victories on the circuit.

But his Olympic history is more patchy: twice fourth in the giant slalom and a fifth in the 2010 slalom before grabbing silver in Sochi, leading to questions about his real legacy.

“This stupid question has now gone away, if I’m thinking that my career is perfect without a gold medal, now this question is zzz, deleted,” he said.

“I’m not travelling home tomorrow, but if I wished to I could because I have my big goal and I reached it.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which handles doping cases during the Games, said Saito had left the athletes’ Olympic Village voluntarily and would be provisionally suspended from all competition pending a full investigation.

The head of the Japanese Olympic delegation in Pyeongchang, Yasuo Saito, said the skater was the first Japanese athlete to test positive for doping at a Winter Olympic Games.

The athlete was “surprised and dismayed” by the outcome of the drugs test, he said.

Kei Sato (top row, far l) poses with teammates after the Japan short track speed skating team for the Winter Olympics is announced in December.

Saito, a human biology student whose sister Hitomi is also competing in Pyeongchang, arrived at the Athletes Village on February 4.

He was woken up at 02:00 the following morning by doping testers who took two samples.

“Both samples tested positive,” said the head of the delegation, who is also the vice-president of the Japan Olympic Committee.

Short-track speed skater Saito was a member of Japan’s 3,000m relay team that finished third at the 2013 and 2014 world junior championships.

He was pencilled in as a substitute for the 5,000m on Tuesday and could have raced in other events in Pyeongchang.

Saito was summoned before a CAS tribunal on Monday following the positive tests for acetazolamide, a medication used to treat complaints ranging from epilepsy to heart failure.

However, it works also as a masking agent that can hide or make it harder for testers to detect the presence of doping products.

Saito said he was innocent of any wrongdoing and had been tested prior to the Games, on January 29, and been found to be drug-free.

“As for the test results this time, the only possibility I can think of is that I accidentally and unconsciously put a banned substance in my mouth,” he added.

He had no need to ingest masking agents, he said.

“I’ve never used body-enhancing drugs so I don’t think about hiding it,” he said. “There’s no merit or motive for me in using this medicine.”

The IOC and anti-doping authorities have stepped up testing for the Pyeongchang Games following revelations of a state-sponsored doping scheme at the last Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014.

The entire Russian team was banned from Pyeongchang but a loophole allowed 168 “clean” athletes to compete as independent athletes under a neutral flag.

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